


Lost Lives

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Community: spook_me, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-26
Updated: 2011-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:49:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sapphire and Steel fight a foe who steals children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost Lives

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for the Spook Me challenge on Livejournal and Dreamwidth. I chose the prompt boogeyman because I wanted to write something using the slender man, although I've gone with only the absolute basics of the concept - the tall, thin monster with tentacles at the end of its arms, who steals children.

It’s a dream, which Steel knows, but it doesn’t lessen the irritation because what he sees isn’t right. When he was a child (no, not a child, not a child as this shape knows them) when he was immature, when he was _young_ there was the home, and it didn’t look anything like what he sees in his dream. He’s been caught in this shape too long. Home was not soaring halls and marble pillars and windows stained with jewelled colours – home was better and he wishes that he could comprehend the beautiful reality of it in this shape, but he can’t.

The feelings are the same though. He dreams, and in his dream he’s a small child, spindly-limbed and flaxen-haired, and he’s out of breath, his lungs tied up with fear, because he knows that it, It, is looking for him. He saw It, tall and monstrously thin, the tendrils at the ends of its arms waving like kelp in the sea, the heavy, roiling kelp that entangles a swimmer and drags them down. So Steel creeps in the beautiful hall, trying to get away. There’s a door ahead, and moonlight and beyond that a courtyard and at the end of the courtyard a lit window and the murmur of adult voices. Safety and comfort are so close, and Steel steps into the arch of the door and stops dead. Either side of the door are two long legs covered in dark cloth, and It bends down and Its terrible upside down smile greets him and Its vile tendrils reach for him, and he screams.

****

“Steel! Steel!”

“What?” He jerks awake, out of the sleep that this shape needs, even toughened as it is. “What?”

“You were having a nightmare,” Sapphire tells him.

“Is that what I was doing?” he says sourly, as his heart gradually lessens its pace, and the stress hormones in his blood begin to diffuse and break down.

She smiles, concerned and knowing together. “Those were the indications, yes.”

“No matter,” he says. “I’ve had enough rest.”

“Yes.” Sapphire’s serene as ever, and as presumptuous. She places one hand on his forehead, her thumb wiping gently at the film of sweat just against the hairline. “Will you be all right?”

He backs away from the touch. “I’m fine. I’m ready to work. Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

“Absolutely,” she says and takes his hand and they step sideways, ignoring the bounds of space. Space is easy. Time, not so much.

***

This is what they know about Elizabeth Kenney, who was the third disruption, the third child. Elizabeth was ten years old, and her parents’ younger daughter. Elizabeth told her friend, Annabeth (they loved that, Annabeth and Elizabeth, it was proof that they were meant to be friends forever) that she saw the slender man. But Elizabeth didn’t tell her parents about the slender man, the boogeyman, because he doesn’t let you. He marks you and he gets inside your head and twists your words up. You can tell other children, but you can’t ever tell the grown-ups. Elizabeth cried when her mother made her go to the little corner shop, and her mother lost her temper and shouted at her and shoved her out the door. And that was the last time her mother ever saw Elizabeth.

The first day, her parents sat huddled together and wept. The police came, and there were pictures and articles in the newspapers. The third day, her mother packed Elizabeth’s belongings away, her clothes and her toys. She handled the dresses and the t-shirts and jeans, and she knew they were Elizabeth’s but she didn’t recall that she bought that t-shirt on holiday by the sea, or that dress for a Christmas present. The fifth day, Detective Sergeant Wilson misplaced the file. The tenth day, Elizabeth’s father asked her mother why there were still so many of Kelly’s old things in the garage. He thought they’d disposed of them years ago. Kelly was their only child by then. There was no other, no Elizabeth; she’d never, ever been, she was gone, not even forgotten because the act of not remembering requires existence and Elizabeth’s existence was devoured and erased out of time.

These disruptions cannot be permitted. They’re _dangerous_. It’s not that whoever or whatever sends Sapphire and Steel cares about _us_.

***

The slender man is hungry – truly it’s as simple as that. The boogeyman eats children, that’s an old, old story, and we remember that at least, even though we don’t remember the individual children, so completely gone that faulty, mortal human memory can’t extend their existence even the little that it ever has. The slender man is awake and hunting, and a coterie of children, joined together by school attendance and friendships and kinships, sleeps uneasily. When awake, they look over their shoulders, and cry more often, and their parents, without memory of lost lives, complain and wonder what’s gotten into their children. The long tendrils at the end of the slender man’s arms are not entirely physical, nor entirely literal. If you have the skill, you can see who’s next, by the long, dark lines in the dreams. If you have the skill.

Steel wishes that he could leave this job to Sapphire – she’s better with humans than he is, more attuned to their minds, but there’s a reason that they have this assignment. He knows the slender man, is one of the monster’s rare misses. The home was not an easy hunting ground for the slender man, and It wisely sought less protected food. This leaves Steel standing sentry, Sapphire’s hands upon his shoulders, searching in the night among confused and frightened minds. He lifts a hand in warning and says, “I’ve found one – no, two.”

“Where?” Sapphire says to him as Steel turns to face her, and they take each other’s hands and move, flash of a night street becoming the quiet of a bedroom. The room is small and dark, cluttered with toys that were never put away before bed. Sapphire and Steel move surely despite the dark and the clutter, and Sapphire sinks onto the mattress, and puts her hand upon the child’s head.

“Oh,” Sapphire says, as if she’s received a shock.

“Can you do it?” Steel asks. Impatience seethes in him – he counted two, two children, two breaks in the fabric of reality, and that’s two too many.

The child stirs in her sleep, and Sapphire coos softly and picks her up and places her in her lap, a Madonna in blue sitting on the edge of the rumpled bed. The little girl, so very little, only four, nestles into Sapphire’s body and is still. “I think so, but I have to be careful.” The room remains dark, but Steel can still see the light that’s Sapphire’s power and hear the throb of it as she gently, oh so painstakingly, plucks those dark lines from out of the dreams.

“Hurry, Sapphire,” Steel says. He can feel the other mind, the other child; Jamie. Jamie is waking. Jamie’s cat is clawing at the back door, frightened and unsettled, and bait. “Hurry,” he says.

Sapphire’s external appearance is calm, but her voice is taut when she speaks into Steel’s mind. “I can’t hurry. I can’t.”

“Follow me when you can,” he commands her and goes, flicking across boundaries to find himself in Jamie’s kitchen.

“Don’t open the door,” he shouts, but it’s too late. The cat, small and tabby, shoots into the room with a yowl and bottlebrush tail, and Jamie, eleven years old, stands transfixed in his night clothes, his narrow, knobby ankles showing clear beneath the too short pyjama legs. Steel lunges for him, strains with hands outstretched, and his grip closes across the boy’s shoulders as dark tentacles whip across over the top of Steel’s skin, dry as the air from a furnace.

“Hello,” says the slender man. “I haven’t seen you in a while.” Then It takes them both.

***  
Steel is a tough nut to crack. He’s a hard, indigestible shell, wrapped around the form of a coltish boy with brown hair and brown eyes and straight brows. Steel thinks that perhaps they are held in the slender man’s hands, but he’s really not sure. One thing that he is sure of is that he mustn’t let go of the child, even as long tentacles squirm around them, seeking purchase between them. Steel holds on to Jamie and all that Jamie is – Jamie’s first cries as his mother pushes him into the world, Jamie’s favourite t-shirt, the year that his parents didn’t give him the toy he really wanted and his sulky displeasure all that Christmas morning. Steel holds on to Jamie’s hate for his teacher when he was eight, and his guilt at writing a rude word on the toilet door at school, and how the fur of Jamie’s little tabby cat is so soft under Jamie’s hands.

The tentacles aren’t _real_ , not here, not in this no place. It’s only that Steel’s shape has to see them that way because the body shapes the brain, which shapes the perceptions, which shapes everything that Steel is and still he holds onto Jamie, their foreheads pressed together, while Jamie hides deep inside his own mind. Steel at least can try to comprehend what’s around them. Jamie doesn’t dare.

“Eat you too,” It hisses in his ear. “Take you back and eat you too.”

“I don’t think so,” Steel says, although his voice trembles with the effort of it. He doesn’t know how long he can hold on, but Steel is stubborn and strong, and in the furnace dry hiss of Its breath he can shape himself into shield and shelter and ensure that It can’t have the child until It breaks Steel first. Steel can be broken, steel can rust, it can be worn away, but it takes time, and the slender man eats time and doesn’t have it to spare to vomit back. It leaves them eventually with a malevolent hiss, but Steel knows It’s watching and waiting, like a cat at a mouse hole. Steel waits with a dead star’s ageless cold patience, while Jamie hides within him for a long time.

Steel thinks at first that he’s dreaming when he hears the voices, and he barely dares to hope. Then he’s afraid because if he can hear them, then the slender man can too. Something envelops him, warmth and blue, and urgent fear, and his eyes, so long used to not seeing are lit with a flash of silver, and the stab of a bolt of light at something sinuous and dark. “This really isn’t my area of expertise, you know,” Silver says with breathless, brittle courage.

“Sapphire?”

“Hush, and hold on.”

“If I must.” It’s token, that’s all. Steel can live with being told what to do if it means the end of this endless dark. There’s another flash of light, and they are, all four of them, in a room, a child’s bedroom. A small tabby cat merrups inquiringly from the rumpled blankets, and Steel looks at the face of the child held in his arms. Jamie’s asleep, and Sapphire puts her hand upon the boy's forehead and nods at him. Steel turns to Silver, and considers the contraption that he’s holding in one immaculate hand.

“Is that an umbrella?” Steel asks, and then tries to clear his throat. He’s hoarse and shaky still.

“It was something of a rush job,” Silver says archly. He lifts the umbrella, stripped to the bones of spokes and handle and festooned with wire like metal cobwebs. “But it did the job, and jolly glad I am of it too. Don’t expect me to do that very often.”

“But you were very brave,” Sapphire tells him.

“That’s an over-rated quality. I leave it to operatives.” Silver raises one eyebrow. “You both do it so charmingly; I simply can’t compete.” With that, Silver is gone.

“I think that you should sleep,” Sapphire says.

Steel considers that idea longingly. Sleep. It’s been such a long time. But the memory of a furnace dry touch sends a shiver up his spine, as he shifts the burden of the child in his arms.

“I can watch. Direct your mind away from anything disturbing.” If you’ll let me, is what Sapphire doesn’t say.

“Yes. Thank you.” It’s an admission but Sapphire makes no comment, and Steel is unspeakably grateful. He lays Jamie upon his bed; Steel has, in one way, carried the boy longer than his mother ever did, he thinks, and presses one kiss on Jamie’s forehead.

What? No-one ever said that Sapphire and Steel didn’t care about _us_. When they can afford to.


End file.
